3D Printing News and Innovation

Now Shipping Faster: Gold, Silver, Steel and Gold Plated Brass

Great news, Shapies! Today, we’re excited to announce a global reduction on lead time on some of your favorite metals! Effective immediately, lead times have been reduced for the Silver Family, the Steel Family, Gold Plated Brass and 14k Gold!

You can see the new ship dates reflect on our Materials page, upon checkout and right here in this chart. We are always working hard to get products to you and your customers faster, and we are excited to be able to do so with so many metals at once. Big props to our Supply Chain and Materials Teams for making this happen!

This is very cool. However, what I’d really love to see is faster turnaround times for the most simple, cheap, basic materials — like the strong & flexible plastic — for product prototyping. It would be awesome to bring the 6-day production time down to 2-3 days…and also to bring the times down significantly for the colored finishes. For doing many iterations of prototyping, 12 business days (with shipping that’s 2-3 weeks) is a long time to wait to see if a design works. Even 6-8 days for the plain white/black material seems like quite a long time. Kind of surprising to see faster turnaround times listed for silver and gold than for e.g. black strong & flexible plastic, to be honest! Or maybe a rush option, e.g. ships in 2 days instead of 6-12 for a $20 premium (or 20%, or whatever)? But can’t argue with the quality — glad to see you guys keep improving the service!

Agreed – Strong plastic lead times down please! Customers (for good or ill) expect Amazon turnaround….. which we all know cannot happen due to the ‘making’ aspect of 3D printing, but, the closer we get, the more competitive this mfgr. process becomes!

I’ll add my support for reduced lead time on the strong materials. I’ve been working on articulated models, testing tolerances and clearance, etc. and the trial and error plus wait times are hard to bear.
Which steps of the process take the most time? Or is it just the backlog of orders?

Thanks for the feedback — I really appreciate it! I run the Supply Chain for Shapeways, and I’m responsible for making sure all your products get made as quickly and affordably as possible, at the highest quality standard.

To your questions on why we can make metals faster but haven’t announced something similar for WSF, I thought it might be helpful to share some context. Overall it’s much easier to shorten production times when you have longer time to start with, as we did with metals, and it was great to be able to shave off significant time there. Our WSF is 6 days now, and getting that faster is exponentially harder (especially when you want to make it consistently fast). But we like a challenge We’re now operating 24/7, and are working on some really innovative solutions, and we won’t stop until you’re happy.

I used to work at Amazon, so trust me that I understand the need for speed, and we hope to have something soon!

Great, we need speed for plastics, it is essential for us to prototype fast enough to present to our clients, otherwise we are forced to use our desktop printer, while the quality is not as good, the speed is much better.

Thanks for the info, Justine. I think we all appreciate the expanding magnitude of your task.
Please let us know if there is anything the users can do to help the process.
For example, would we be willing to do extra or specific prep work on our files or forego some checks on your end? Maybe there could be an expedited path if these things were done.